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An IRC channel I’ve been in for many, many years requires bots start all messages with a zero width non breaking space and ignore all messages starting with the same character in order to prevent loops. To my brain this is the canonical example of a beautifully elegant hack.

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So they reinvented CTCP but with ZWSP instead of ^A? 😂

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With inverse semantics: the flag inhibits automatic responses

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Realistically this is reinventing NOTIFY except without the different display behaviour of NOTIFY

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The specification defines NOTICE as being the same as PRIVMSG with automatic replies inhibited: ietf.org/rfc/rfc1459.txt 4.4.2 Notice Clients usually display it differently but they're not meant to highlight it and treat it as an announcement. Some old/broken clients do that.

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It would probably be better if clients didn't display it differently so that people didn't avoid it to have messages displaying the same way for bots. weechat and irssi just display it differently and it's really not an annoyance. Some broken clients treat it as a mention...

1:46 PM · Aug 22, 2022Twitter Web App